9/11 Anniversary

10 weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York City our daughter performed in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. As the first major NYC public event in the post 9/11 world, that Macy’s Parade was overwhelming with anxiety over alertness yet at the same time overpowering with the spirit of togetherness, pride, and resolve that swept this country. Pictured is a NYFD firehouse off Times Square that lost 15 firefighters responding to the attack.

 

In Spring of 2002 we paid our respects in person to the hallowed ground that once was the World Trade Center. Letters, cards, and children’s drawings encased in plastic from families to loved ones lost in the Towers wallpapered the church fence across the street. You just read and read and read. You either cried or fought back tears. Total strangers hugged and supported each other. I’ve never experienced anything like it. … Standing sentinel over the crater and grave for thousands stood a cross of steel created by the collapse.

      

On the 1st Anniversary of 9/11, Megan and I boarded and safely traveled on an airplane. Waiting in the airport for takeoff, TV’s droned on with non-stop news coverage replaying the events of the previous year and ‘talking heads’ unending babble about how terrorists might mark this 1st anniversary. I feel for the thousands traveling by air today and the annoying speculation of the ‘talking heads’.

 

My heart goes out to those families that left those notes and children’s drawings to loved ones lost. Their love and pain will never be forgotten.

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How we as one family lived 9/11/01 was shared a couple years ago in 9/11.

 

… and sometimes it pays to hang on to pictures like this one from January of 1998 taken at sunset from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Our daughter will never be age 9 again and neither will the lower Manhattan sky line ever look as pictured.